Music Review: Silica Angel

Introduction
Evan-Daniel Rose-González’s work plays as a journey into another world. You then find out that world is simply a sonic version of the real world. The real which you understand if someone asks you what you hear day-to-day, but before hearing his work, you did not understand with empathy, nor in feeling.
Rose-González’s music persona is called Silica Angel. A 2015 album called Native Copper is a song I fully grokked for the first time in 2018. I first listened to it in 2015.
While sorting the articles for a book titled, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff, I put on all Silica Angel’s albums while I worked. Native Copper came up while I was reading an article about the structure of Silicon Valley start-ups around the end of the dot-com bubble burst. I was around 45 mins into Native Copper. A sound I heard set me off thinking.
The sound is of a notification from Steam that is warped but recognizable. I think about behavioral modification through notifications, something the Zuboff book discusses as a main idea. That reminds me of Pavlov’s dog or Skinner’s experiments on rodents, Facebook’s experiments on Facebook “Users” wherein they used “nudges” to get them to post negative things more often by introducing negative stimuli to their News Feed, and a related one where Cambridge Analytica changed the voting behavior of US citizens through Facebook advertising.
Those sounds, meant to nudge us to spend time at the lever of the “Skinner-box” of notifications, ask us to react and respond. Pavlov’s experiment with dogs involved causing dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by coordinating it with feedings. Notifications are the “bell,” and messages to reply to are the “feedings”.
Rose-González uses these sounds because they are everywhere in our lives. We all experience notifications. Repurposed into song form, Rose-González’s music is a parody or a freeing up of the mind from response to this sound. Maybe even a form of mental resistance to it. My own reaction to the piece was to think about the sounds of our lives, with no notification to respond to I reflected instead of what I’d usually do at hearing that sound.
A moment like this is what I search for in music, or sound, or installation art, or a game, or anything I look for to entertain me. I like to have my time respected and give me some real, deep or personal value. I want to be made to think, reconsider, doubt, imagine, ideate. Silica Angel is not about blockbuster pop music, even if it could be. It goes where eagles dare.
Deep Listening
It may seem pedantic to mention what musicians influence a certain other musician however I think it’s an honor to note that Rose-González was mentored by none other than Pauline Oliveros, the founder of Deep Listening in his Electronic Media Arts degree. A respect for the ear, the field of sound, and for life is present in this work that you won’t find in many others.
Silica Angel’s body of work attaches onto the place you listen to it. If you listen at your house, your house becomes an installation. Everythin’ in that place becomes a viable focus. Everything you consider can meld with Silica Angel pieces.
This quality of Silica Angel’s music is a direct call-out to the nature of Deep Listening as taught by Oliveros and other certified Deep Listeners. Deep Listeners focus their attention to their ears, taking in all sound as symphony.
Deep Listening Institute fosters creative innovation across boundaries and across abilities, among artists and audience, musicians and non-musicians, healers and the physically or cognitively challenged, and children of all ages. This ever-growing community of musicians, artists, scientists and certified Deep Listening practitioners strives for a heightened consciousness of the world of sound and the sound of the world. — from Deep Listening Institute ; more About here.
Deep Listening practitioners come up with their own idea of what Deep Listening means. However, something that does unite them seems to be an experimental interpretation of sonic experience as the source of their Thing.
Etymology
Rose-González is a huge old-video-game fan. He’s mentioned that the music from Final Fantasy and other classic games inspired him to become a musician in the first place. This overlays where you are with an ancient desert or archipelago, imagined airships flying about, villains made real, cackling, and wearing elaborate outfits. You hear the ancient sounds of the unconscious and the imagination when you listen to Silica Angel.

Silica Angel’s previous incarnation was Opaque Body. These two names are integrated opposites, like yin-yang or night-day. The body of the one is the root of the other.
So, for instance, Opaque illustrates impenetrability by light, or made invisible by a barrier. An Angel is a typically benevolent celestial being that acts as an intermediary between Heaven and Earf. Angels are a human symbol representing what we can’t perceive, or if you are god-fearing, Angels are the form God takes to communicate with Opaque Bodies. The interrelated opposite of Body, is an Angel since they’re thought of as incorporeal and celestial, relating to the heavens, filled with light. Yet the Opaque Body is the recipient of the communication with Angels.
Silica is a specific Body, present in many living things as well as electronic microchips. A Silica Angel would be easy to imagine communicating with Earf and its Opaque Bodies through the plane of digital reality and made corporeal by the silica of microchips, a parallel of the mind or of God.
I compare digital reality through hardware as similar to angels communicating God’s will not to imply something sacrilegious or to deify something atheist. I make this comparison because it makes real the spirituality of people through their day-to-day perceptions.
If this etymology goes off its rockers for you, just take it as a kind of poetry that the musician lends to his decision makings in namings and in soundings!
Listening
If you’re not a usual fan of noise, or field recordings, or experimental music, try to approach his music like you would a new food that you’ve never tried before. If you give this music the space to work, it’s not meant as casual listening, even when it verges into chill-wave, it’s meant to give respect to the listener by creating sound that is original.
I recommend trying out Silica Angel’s music in different locations. Try to fantasize about what you’re seeing, or simply listen and take in exactly what you see. I encourage you to spend your time with Rose-Gonzalez’s pieces, which are crafted with care and carried out with responsibility to a listener.
Plug
So check out Silica Angel’s work here on his bandcamp, like his Facebook page, etc. A person in his 20s, Rose-Gonzalez will only grow and improve as he ages. It’s worth it to follow him as he searches for the heart of the matter.
Divulgance
Author knows Musician semi-personally, having grown through the same music and arts collective at college, and shared an affection for the real world and its humorous mundanity. Also, Author is a Certified Deep Listener.
